We've had a great response to our recent call for project car suggestions. They range from late-model police cars to Rancheros. The variety is stunning and reveals the depth of the hobby. You can see some of the reader mail in the Mailbox section on p. 16, but the message is clear: Picking any one of these as a project car is a difficult task. Do you go middle-of-the-road, or way out in Freakville?
I mention this because our company is on a huge survey kick. Lots of publishing companies do them and it usually works like this: An editor writes a bunch of questions asking you to rate your interest in different story ideas, then the suits send out the survey to everyone on a subscriber e-mail list. Once the results are in, the editor will do a bunch of stories mimicking the top vote-getters on the survey. Kinda reminds me of the early '90s when every car GM made had to get designed by a focus group.
In theory, surveys and focus groups point to general areas of interest, but things really break down when you look at the specific desires of individual readers. Look no further than our project car letters and you'll see what I mean. We've yet to get a letter asking us to do a '69 Camaro with a small-block, but paradoxically, '69 Camaros kick ass on surveys.
The idea behind surveys is to find the "average" reader, and build a magazine to fit that model. Under normal conditions, that would produce the magazine equivalent of a '93 Buick-the posterchild for Detroit focus groups. By contrast, I see our search for PHR's next project car as a microcosm for what's right about our company, and PHR in particular. It's the idea that the individual isn't going to get lost in the crush to create the so-called "perfect" magazine.
Here's an example. Back in February, we sent out a survey including, among other ideas, a story feeler about an 800hp pump-gas Cadillac. If you've ever been pissed about seeing a million build-ups on small-block Chevys, this story would surely appeal to you, if only for shock value, right? Let me tell you, the story idea tanked badly. In fact, our corporate guys told us if we put it on the cover, fewer people would buy the magazine than if we didn't put it on the cover at all. We're still doing the Caddy-next month, in fact. Will it be blurbed on the front? Who knows?
What makes our surveys different than the thousands before them is the wisdom gained from past experience. You may have noticed there's a new name on the PHR masthead-David Freiburger. You know him as the past editor of Hot Rod and Car Craft, but now he's PHR's editorial director. He'll be our ace in the hole, our corporate bullshit detector. With DF, there's no way PHR is going to get turned into a '93 Buick-unless it has a tire-smoking 455 under the hood.
If you haven't noticed, PHR is now 140 pages and, for the first time in 43 years, it's all color. Freiburger and I will make sure all that extra ink gets put to good use. We'll be using survey data to gauge overall opinion about story ideas, but that will be tempered by individual reader opinions. Call it the perfect merger of art and science. Yeah, you'll see plenty of small-block Chevy build-ups, but there will still be Caddys, Buicks, Pontiacs, Mopars, and Fords.
Want to tell us how to run PHR? It's simple. Go to the popularhotrodding.com home page, click on "Reader Panel," and you'll be included on future surveys, guaranteed. You'll get to vote on how much you like our story ideas, but the best part is you'll also be able to write specific comments that go beyond plain ol' voting. That's where our best ideas will come from.